Mac Campbell of Baltimore Convention Center tells Nestor about the significance of convention business for economic growth, highlighting the importance of attracting and hosting large-scale events to pack downtown in the years to come.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
convention center, baltimore, city, baltimore convention center, convention, downtown, building, year, ravens, campbell, give, exhibitors, runs, friends, big, mac, arena, week, met, downtown baltimore
SPEAKERS
Mac Campbell, Nestor Aparicio
Nestor Aparicio 00:00
Welcome home. We are W, N, S T, tousled, Baltimore, Baltimore, positive. We are positively here at Mako in Ocean City. It’s the Maryland’s counties, Maryland counties conference, including lots of cool people, old friends, new friends, beer cheer, all of those things, all brought to you by the Maryland lottery. The Gold Rush sevens doublers are here. We will be giving these away with the cheatstros on Friday at fatales. This guy knows a little bit about fates. Also our friends at Jiffy Lubin and liberty pure. I want to give them some love as well talking more about that. And we’re gonna be doing the crab cake tour Cocos on the fourth of September. And then we’re doing 26 oysters in 26 days, in 26 ways, and that’s going to begin on the fifth when the Ravens kick off. Matt Campbell runs the convention center. I like him because his name’s MAC, which is my dad’s name. Why Mac or my dad’s real name was Bernard mcgurgan, and they called him Mac or Big Mac, because mcgurgan was his last name. But you’re like a legitimate Max, like a first name, and you’re not a Mick Campbell, also,
Mac Campbell 01:03
technically, it would be redundant if we did it the right way. My name is Matthew Allen Campbell, M, A, C,
Nestor Aparicio 01:09
oh, so that’s how, you know, I don’t know what Mac Davis’s real name was. I’m trying to think of famous Max mac daddy. You know what I mean? You know the daddy? Mac Wiggity. Wiggity, wicked whack.
Mac Campbell 01:21
Return of the Mac. Return of the Mac. That’s a good song. Everybody
Nestor Aparicio 01:25
loves, Return of the Mac. So this is the return of the Mac on the program. And I when I met you last year, a year ago yesterday, I met you had a bar like Brian McKinney once came on the show after the Super Bowl, and he said, and I said, you don’t meet anybody nice in a bar after 11 o’clock. Some of my best friends I’ve met after 11 o’clock at night in a bar, true. And I’m finding that out of makeup that I you know, Mayor Frederick denied that he met me in a bar after midnight, but he did so, but that’s makeup. I met you last year. It turns out you like, you’re really close with Alan McCallum, who I was in Alan’s House last week watching shampoo with him and Max Weiss and, you know, handing out Oscars to Carrie Fisher and other people. You’re like, like a local guy, but you’ve done a lot of theater things and management things, and now you’re running the Baltimore Convention Center, and I want to give you kudos, because I’m your Facebook friend, and we’re like, friends in the real world a little bit, but you scored, like, this massive convention like this week. So you do have breaking news to brag on for Baltimore, not till 2031 I hope to be alive then. I hope to be living back in the city by then, to be honest with you. So
Mac Campbell 02:32
yeah, it’s actually 2033 but I’ll be
Nestor Aparicio 02:35
alive then, and living in a city by that gives me two more years to figure it out. So so will I be? Then, hold on, is this 2439 I’ll still be sexy. I’ll only be 64 there.
Mac Campbell 02:46
That’s perfect. Love
Nestor Aparicio 02:48
me when I’m 64 Yeah, no, right. All right, I won’t be 65 yet. All right. Good. Nestor. I missed what is this thing?
Mac Campbell 02:58
It’s the American Society of Association Executives. It’s the association that’s exciting. So it’s, it’s, it’s over. The Association has hundreds of 1000s of members, but this is where every decision maker for every Association, and there is an association for everything, comes to say, like, what city are we going to come to right? So you learn about all the various destinations, but obviously the destination in which you’re going to gets a real big bump, because you’re getting not only the impact of that convention, but then you’re seeing 20% of your leads increase. You’re seeing more people say, Oh, I never thought I was going to go to Baltimore.
Nestor Aparicio 03:39
Now are we gonna have a new convention center by then? Oh,
Mac Campbell 03:43
we better, darn Yes. Okay. I’m manifesting a positive outcome. I do not have anything official. I will say this. So, so, so bottom line,
Nestor Aparicio 03:52
what makes us need one? And I’m not saying this to be No, the Hold on. Now, I’m in a convention center, right? You are. I have done much to Chad Steele’s chagrin, 27 Super Bowls in 27 convention halls in at least 18 or 19 different places. When you go to Miami for the Super Bowl, Miami Beach gets it one year, and Fort Lauderdale gets it the next year, and then Miami, so it’s I’ve been in so many convention halls. I’ve attended fire walks with Tony Robbins in Orlando, and all these places, all of them looked and feel the same to me in so many ways, but I know structurally, they’re not. I had Tom prolazo here running ocean cities business. He’s been a long time friend of mine. This convention center can’t have the volleyball matches that you have because he doesn’t have the floor in here to do it. So there’s, there are things I’m learning. But on the outside of it, I’ve been to San Diego, which is this giant thing where they have the Comic Con thing. I’ve been to trying to think of the most famous with Chicago. Been to Javid. To New York. I’ve been to all of these giant ones. I don’t know your industry, and certainly your audience wouldn’t know what makes something attractive to me. Walkability is everything. Sure, if I can be at a convention, get every every booth. I mean, it’s a convention booth, it’s all the kind of the same. It’s what’s outside of the walls that lures people in, right? I mean, a little bit Wi Fi working has to work right, other than that, so
Mac Campbell 05:23
you hit, you hit number one of the big ones, is a vibrant downtown, right? That’s walkable, that can engage the patron after the stuff is done. But we always make sure that if we if a customer, our customer, is going to be happy. They’re exhibitors, you are going to be happy. So that means everybody that has one of these 10 by 10 booths is having an exceptional thing, because these exhibitors are what pay a large disproportionate amount of that time.
Nestor Aparicio 05:48
I don’t I’ve been to the Baltimore Convention Center for covid shots, for Ed block banquets, for just all sort I mean, for your events with the nest on the backside, I would say for me, I I’ve never felt like it’s lacking anything. I’ve never been there and thought, Oh, this is shitty, you know, like, I never think that about our matter of fact, the exact opposite last year, when you brought me to the nest, that I thought I’d have my wedding here. That’s, that’s how nice the backside of your place is, that stairs at the at the warehouse, our
Mac Campbell 06:21
team does an exceptional job. We’ve got about 150 employees that work 20 hour days, seven days a week, to make sure that the magic happens behind the scenes. We’re in 1979 original construction building on one side, and 1996
Nestor Aparicio 06:33
on the other. And I remember both of those, hey.
Mac Campbell 06:37
And the problem is, is we, our capital funding has not been, historically what we needed to be. So while Ocean City just got a recent renovation, I mean, that hall didn’t exist a year and a half ago, we haven’t been able to do that since 96 so there’s a lot of things to your point. We don’t have fiber that runs through a building for better internet. A lot of our amenities that an exhibitor would appreciate no longer work. So we’re working on trying to to really lobby hard this year to get all the new bells and whistles to keep us competitive. Because you’re right downtown is second to none. I went to Cleveland for this, this,
Nestor Aparicio 07:15
Oh, that’s right, you were Cleveland two weeks ago.
Mac Campbell 07:17
That’s where we got the word that we were getting ASAE. And I’d never been to Cleveland, and I was like, Oh, cool. I get to check out a new city. I We all have a perception of Cleveland because there are, oh, I love Cleveland. I’ve been to Cleveland, no, what a great city like it was, it was it was walkable, it was vibrant, it was clean, it was everything was where it needed to be. But we’re better, but we need the bodies on the ground in downtown to really be able to build all that back up. And I think between harbor place, between all the stuff that’s happening at the arena, the arena, the stadium, the football
Nestor Aparicio 07:49
CFG arenas, brought me downtown, and I left the city two years ago, not sort of famously, just, you know, I’m in a city four days a week, man, you know this. I mean, I’m a Family sex fry. I mean, I invite you all the time, and you’re too damn busy and running your convention center, so I’m glad I made a little time to get to get together with you to learn about this because and I’m glad it came on the back end serendipity, really, most of my life is but you scored this big thing that you want to brag about that really is a big thing. I know it is,
Mac Campbell 08:13
but you talked about the arena. CFG arena put in two $50 million to renovate, right all, all private funds, and they are now with just a couple tweaks to how their building functions, to your number one in the world, what the fourth, number four in the world for an arena their size? Because they were intentional about what they did. That building still the same building. It was in the 60s. God love it. Thank God for that. So, so, so look at the convention center. That’s kind of what we’re hoping to kind of emulate. I’ll say this because I’m going to I’m going to take the liberty. So right now, in addition to winning ASAE last week, we also started the very first meeting of our convention center Task Force. The Governor and the Mayor said, Hey, I need industry leaders in finance, in buildings, in civics, to get in a room and tell us how to fix the convention center for the long term, right? Because just
Nestor Aparicio 09:04
giving me, you’re not building it for 24 you’re building it for 40 I want
Mac Campbell 09:07
to, I want to be wheeled out of there, and I don’t want to be handing that building over to somebody when it’s falling apart, right? So it’s two things. It’s, How do we get that new building? But also, how do we make sure that we’re set up to be really competitive against the Cleveland’s, the Columbus is the Nashville’s that were wrecked, that were regularly losing to and we should, because we can set up a governance structure that that makes us more like a business and less like a city agency, while still being a city agency, right? So, so there’s a lot of a lot of firepower in this room. Is
Nestor Aparicio 09:38
it safe to say the convention center has lost money over years and years and years, and not just that lost opportunity cost is really right, yes. I mean, I remember you’re going to call it by its official name, and this really appeals to you because you’re friends with Alan nerdfest that used to come downtown every year. Oticon. Oticon, we called it nerdfest. Because my wife and I lived on the 23rd floor, and just the costumes would just show up, and we would be like, over at the Inner Harbor somewhere, and it’s just costume city. And one year we what was in August. Does that sound right? It’s summer. Yeah, yeah. One year we were like, on our wedding anniversary or something, or like, in Jamaica, just out of town, and we’re like, No, we can’t leave when nerdfest is here. You know that Oticon thing brought so many people, and it was so obvious, just like the volleyball tournaments, just like the health food shows, like and just like the motorcycle and boat shows, the car, like all of those things, now they’re more obvious to me. When I lived in the 23rd floor, I’d see the load in. I would see trucks and trailers. And when you have a car show, I’d see car but when people are coming downtown and filling up the hotels, filling up the restaurants, you see they’re on a four day Bender, like we are in Ocean City right now. We’re very obvious. We’re all walking around. We’re all nerdy badges and like all that. It’s obvious to Ocean City people in their shorts. Oh, the politicos are all here. You know what I mean. It felt that way as a city resident that you’d say, Oh, the blankety blank is here, right? And I lived downtown 19 years. There was less blankety blank over the 19 years. Just, you know what I mean? Just you would feel it more in the arts, just people descending upon downtown, like the way when an Army Navy game beat that you just would see, like, wow, we have a Super Bowl here this weekend, and the convention center, other than Oriole games and concerts appear. You know it’s a thing that can bring an army to town? Well, we see between
Mac Campbell 11:39
405 100,000 people a year. So I it’s 10,000 a week. I engaged. I engaged. I don’t want to call him a troll, but I engaged a gentleman on Instagram the other day, and he was like, Well, finally the convention center is going to be going to have something. And I was like, why don’t you come down? Because, just because you don’t realize, like, for instance, the IRS was with us for four days this past week, right? They had 1000s of tax preparers in our building. You don’t realize that? Well, you
Nestor Aparicio 12:08
realize that if you’re a server, you know, to meet cheese, yes, yeah, yeah, you do Yeah, no doubt about it. And I realized that living above your building for 19 years, yeah, but,
Mac Campbell 12:17
but to your point about Oticon, so that they just hit a new attendance record of over 46,000 people. They moved to DC because they needed more space. They weren’t affiliate one bright No, so, so the food conference that you’re talking about natural products, they moved to Philly, okay, all right, because they also needed to get bigger. So this
Nestor Aparicio 12:35
really isn’t you’ve grown these things, and they’re wonderful events, and then they get they become too big, like a band to play a theater, they need to play an arena, right?
Mac Campbell 12:43
So, so, so a lot of people make the headlines of, oh, you lost a big show. You know? You know, we’re we as a destination, aren’t doing our job. Our job should be constantly refilling the bench, right? We should be growing the smalls into the next bigs, to your point, because we only have so much land, right? We can’t, we can’t continue to grow and be in Orlando, in downtown ball.
Nestor Aparicio 13:03
You’re not going to usurp eminent domain on otter behind, yeah,
Mac Campbell 13:07
they’d have, they’d have opinions on that. Well, maybe the Federal
Nestor Aparicio 13:09
Reserve would get out of there for you, give you that space, you know, so you can have an underground. Oh, there already is an underground, but, yeah, so I saw President Obama sneak in there one night. But, you know, into that tunnel. You have so many stories. Yeah, you know happens, but
Mac Campbell 13:23
So, so what we’re trying to do right now is we’re trying to be best in class, in what we are, while still increasing our size a little bit, because the convention of 1979 is very different than the convention of 2024 and it’s going to be very different than the convention of 2033 so we have to get ahead of those things, and we’re still offering infrastructure from the 80s, and we need as much as we can put new carpet, new furniture and slap screens on walls. We still need more, more amenities that really need capital investment. So, long story short, we’re working on making sure that gets done. You probably followed that Pimlico Plus program that got the Preakness to stay in Baltimore, yes. So we are following in those exact same footsteps. So this past December, you heard on on, you know, on the radio that, hey, they just submitted the plan to how to keep Preakness in Baltimore. So by December of this year, we’re going to make the exact same report recommendation on here’s what the governance and financing for a future Convention Center is going to look like. So stay tuned, billions. It’s going to be a big number. I mean, if you Google that, there’s 24 Convention Center properties, either being built or renovating, that are comparable or larger to us right now. So our market share gets harder and harder to fight for every day. So they’re big numbers, they’re big numbers, but we are. They’re important numbers. They’re important numbers, because historically, we’re I would just
Nestor Aparicio 14:47
hope anybody in the audience making it through this and listen to Matt Campbell for the Why wouldn’t they? How it’s just for people to understand what makes cities go other, crime, murder. All that crap that Fox 45 throws out, right? Important, we got to fix all that. But part of that perception and reality of what’s really going on in the city and what really grows in municipality, and what my eye saw as a resident for 20 years from the sky, looking and seeing, quite frankly, the disintegration of my home, you know, my city, to the point where my building that I bought for X amount of dollars went down 30% over 20 years and had to give away my property because it was not well taken care of. And we have a group now, and I believe in what Wes Moore. I believe in his commitment to the city. I’m down here every year I see people, competent, good people like you trying to lift this up, but it is going to take money above and beyond what Macker West has in his back pocket. And we talk about the bait the bridge going down and all of that there is investment in a convention center in a downtown municipality is critical, more critical than the football team. It just is. It really is.
Mac Campbell 16:02
It may not be a sexy but from an economic impact standpoint, we’re a four to one return on investment for and we’re talking, you know, our build, our building is 1.2 million square feet. It cost, at the time, hundreds of millions of dollars to build. It’s going to cost even more than that to do what we want to do, whenever we need to do really, but our job is to drive economic impact, to the amicis, to to the museum, to the hotel replace and very much, to the hotels and our our secret sauce is we’re we’re subsidized by the state and the city. Why? Because two thirds of what we do happens through sales tax, which Baltimore city doesn’t get. Baltimore city doesn’t get any of their sales tax. The state sees all that. So we’re a partner with the state. And if you know, when we have a big basketball tournament, those people are staying in the city and out by the airport. So the county, Anne Arundel County feels that. Howard County feels it. So we are a regional convention center that has statewide reach. So we’re really excited. It’s a big project. There’s $6.9 billion being invested into downtown Baltimore right now, within a mile in McKellen Plaza down by harbor place, 6.9 billion. I
Nestor Aparicio 17:13
keep hearing those numbers from GB Downtown Partnership as well. Like all these numbers are out, I would love to think that the people in the counties, Howard Hartford and, you know, I saw Calvin Ball the other day, I’m gonna have Johnny Owen a little later on today, that they understand that coming down to CFG Bank Arena, coming down to an Oriole game, coming to that being a part of Baltimore, of the city, coming down to Canton, coming down to Fells Point, when visitors come to town, bringing them down for these things and staying a little longer and looking at that convention center when you’re coming to the CFG Bank Arena or the stadium, and saying, Hey, that in some cases, is what people see when they come to the city and when they come in to your point in 2033 it’s what you’re hoping they take to other places that can really stimulate the next 20 years of what our city is going to
Mac Campbell 18:05
be about. And I would say, winning things like ASAE for 2033 also starts people saying, Wait, they chose Baltimore. We
Nestor Aparicio 18:12
better fix her up.
Mac Campbell 18:13
But also, what are we missing out on? So we after that announcement happened this past weekend, we had people come up to us, saying, When can we come for a site visit? If ASAE knows good enough for them, it’s
Nestor Aparicio 18:24
good enough for me, right? Okay, so,
Mac Campbell 18:26
so it’s not just we got to wait till 2033 to see the impact. We’re seeing it now because of the work we’re doing, because we typically book five to eight years out, like this is not a short lead business. So yes, we booked the car show. We booked Comic Con, who’s having its 25th anniversary.
Nestor Aparicio 18:40
Yeah, you think a wedding? Something trying to plan a wedding to you? Wedding to a year or two out in a wedding hall. You got a whole different convention business. You’re booking 28 to 29 all day. We’re
Mac Campbell 18:48
out to 35 Wow. So, I mean, and so it’s not out of the ordinary, but folks don’t realize that, because they don’t run a convention center, and it’s our job to be able to communicate what the value to the citizens of Maryland is for this big building and what it does, and
Nestor Aparicio 19:05
you just did next time you do it, come up the fade leads when you get Yeah, man, it’s free time. Come on, come on, buy leaves and have a crab cake with me. Matt Campbell is the good man who runs the Baltimore Convention Center, friend of Allen McCallum. So you know He’s trouble Gold Rush seven doubles will have these down to faith leagues. I gotta get Allen that baseball. It’s exciting, the baseball and football thing. And I know you’re caps guy, right too, but the baseball and football thing right here, right now, September, October, for the Orioles and ravens and beyond this next six months is I’ve been doing this 33 years. Man, this is as good as it gets to have a chance to win a championship or two,
Mac Campbell 19:42
absolutely. And by what 2026 ravens walk is going to be a year round festival, place where we can bring conventions, where people can come and hang out. The new amphitheater, new concert venue out there. It’s going to be really, really cool. The stuff that the ravens and the Orioles are figuring out, the stuff
Nestor Aparicio 19:58
that the taxpayer. You’re paying for I want to, I want to put the
Mac Campbell 20:01
taxpayers we’ll be able to appreciate and we’ll be able to land conventions because of that. So it’s, it’s definitely a symbiont, for sure. Well, I
Nestor Aparicio 20:10
mean, it all is, right? I mean, the more cool things that are going on. I mean, I’ll give you an example how cool Baltimore is. And everybody here has talked to me about this, because I’ve made the mistake of saying, my wife and I are at odds about September the 12th, or whatever that date is, Springsteen and sticks and Lake Street dive down in Howard County, all the same night Pearl Jam night before. So we got Pearl Jam on Thursday, Springsteen on Friday. Who knows that maybe there’s, I mean, I’ve seen any veteran the pit of the Springsteen show together in Brisbane, Australia. So I know they know each other. I know they went surfing together one day on the Gold Coast in Australia, because I was in the green room that day. So, you know, Baltimore, you know, I mean, we’re we’re there, Springsteen, Pearl Jam, Orioles, ravens, all of the shows Usher all the stuff going on in downtown Baltimore,
Mac Campbell 21:02
Fleet Week, you know, you know, Artscape, we do big things and and it’s for everybody, so sometimes you can get good weather, yeah, that’d be nice shot. Shaka doesn’t, doesn’t think fine.
Nestor Aparicio 21:15
Almost went down to the whalers. Almost went the thing that pissed me off was last year when we miss chic, when she got wall you wash out Nile Rodgers, you mess with my mojo, you know? Because these are not good times when that happens. Matt Campbell from the Baltimore Convention Center, joining us all. They’re brought to you by friends at Liberty. Pure solutions, keeping our water crystal clear. I got a hat now and a mug and some water, so I’m gonna be doing that on the set. Also our friends at Jiffy Lube, multi care. Luke Scott, you covered on football and baseball. I’ve got you covered from down here at Mako in Ocean City. We’re gonna be doing a lot of sports all week long, getting you ready for the Ravens. Get ready to tackle the chiefs on the fifth of September, which also kicks off our 26th anniversary and 26 oysters in 26 days back for more in Ocean City, Maryland. Right after this, you.
